Red Dusk and the Morrow · Chapter 14 (1/2)

XIV

Conclusion

As I put pen to paper to write the concluding chapter of this book the news is arriving of the affliction of Russia with one of her periodical famine scourges, an event which cannot fail to affect the country politically as well as economically. Soviet organizations are incompetent to cope with such a situation. For the most pronounced effect both on the workers and on the peasantry of the communistic experiment has been to eliminate the stimulus to produce, and the restoration of liberty of trading came too late to be effective. A situation has arisen in which Russia must make herself completely dependent for rescue upon the countries against which her governors have declared a ruthless political war.

The Communists are between the devil and the deep sea. To say “Russia first” is equivalent to abandoning hope of the world revolution, for Russia can only be restored by capitalistic and bourgeois enterprise. But neither does the prospect of refusing all truck with capitalists, preserving Russia in the position of world-revolutionary citadel, offer any but feeble hopes of world-revolutionary success. For the gulf between “the party” and the Russian people, or as Lenin has recently expressed it in a letter to a friend in France,7 “the gulf between the governors and the governed,” is growing ever wider. Many Communists show signs of weakening faith. Bourgeois tendencies, as Lenin observes, “are gnawing more and more at the heart of the party.” Lastly and most terrible, the proletarians of the West, upon whom the Bolsheviks from their earliest moments based all their hopes, show no sign whatever of fulfilling the constantly reiterated Bolshevist prediction that they would rise in their millions and save the only true proletarian government from destruction.

Alas! there is but one way to bridge the gulf dividing the party from the people. It is for Russian Communists to cease to be first Communists and then Russians, and to become Russians and nothing else. To expect this of the Third International, however, is hopeless. Its adherents possess none of the greatness of their master, who, despite subsequent casuistic tortuosities, has demonstrated the ability, so rarely possessed by modern politicians, honestly and frankly to confess that the policy he had inaugurated was totally wrong. The creation of the Third International was perhaps inevitable, embodying as it does the essentials of the Bolshevist creed, but it was a fatal step. If the present administration lays any claim to be a Russian government, then the Third International is its enemy. Even in June, 1921, at the very time when the Soviet Government was considering its appeal to Western philanthropy, the Third International was proclaiming its insistence on an immediate world revolution and discussing the most effective methods of promoting and exploiting the war which Trotsky declared to be inevitable between Great Britain and France, and Great Britain and the United States! But there are Communists who are willing to put Russia first, overshadowed though they often are by the International; and the extent to which the existing organized administration may be utilized to assist in the alleviation of suffering and a bloodless transition to sane government depends upon the degree in which Communist leaders unequivocally repudiate Bolshevist theories and become the nearest things possible to patriots.

There are many reasons why, in the event of a modification of regime, the retention of some organized machine, even that established by the Communists, is desirable. In the first place there is no alternative ready to supplant it. Secondly, the soviet system has existed hitherto only in name, the Bolsheviks have never permitted it to function, and there is no evidence to prove that such a system of popular councils properly elected would be a bad basis for at least a temporary system of administration. Thirdly, Bolshevist invitations to non-Bolshevist experts to function on administrative bodies, especially in the capitals, began at an early date as I have already pointed out. For one reason or other, sometimes under compulsion, sometimes voluntarily, many of these invitations have been accepted. Jealously supervised by the Communist Party, experts who are anything but Communists hold important posts in government departments. They will obviously be better versed in the exigencies of the internal situation than outsiders. To sweep away the entire apparatus means to sweep away such men and women with it, which would be disastrous. It is only the purely political organizations⁠—the entire paraphernalia of the Third International and its department of propaganda, for instance, and, of course, the Extraordinary Commission⁠—that must be consigned bag and baggage to the rubbish heap.

I have always emphasized the part silently and self-sacrificingly played by a considerable section of the intellectual class who have never fled from Russia to harbours of safety, but have remained to bear on their backs, together with the mass of the people, the brunt of adversity and affliction. These are the great heroes of the revolution, though their names may never be known. They will be found among teachers, doctors, nurses, matrons, leaders of the former cooperative societies, and so forth, whose one aim has been to save whatever they could from wreckage or political vitiation. Subjected at first to varying degrees of molestation and insult, they stuck it through despite all, and have never let pass an opportunity to alleviate distress. Their unselfish labours have even restored to a state of considerable efficiency some of the soviet departments, particularly such as are completely nonpolitical in character. This is no indication of devotion to Bolshevism, but rather of devotion to the people despite Bolshevism. I believe the number of such disinterested individuals to be much larger than is generally supposed and it is to them that we must turn to learn the innermost desires and needs of the masses.

I will cite in this connection a single instance. There was formed just previous to the Great War an organization known as the League for the Protection of Children, which combined a number of philanthropic institutions and waged war on juvenile criminality. As a private non-State and bourgeois institution its activities were suppressed by the Bolsheviks, who sought to concentrate all children’s welfare work in Bolshevist establishments, the atmosphere of which was political and the objects propagandist. The state of these establishments varies, some being maintained by special effort in a condition of relative cleanliness, but the majority, according to the published statements of the Bolsheviks, are falling into a condition of desperate insanitation and neglect. In any case, toward the close of 1920, the Bolsheviks were constrained, in view of ever-increasing juvenile depravity and demoralization, to appeal to the remnants of the despised bourgeois League for the Protection of Children to investigate the condition of the children of the capitals and suggest means for their reclamation. The report submitted by the League was appalling in the extreme. I am unable to say whether the recommendations suggested were accepted by the rulers, but the significance lies in the fact that, notwithstanding persecution, the League has contrived to maintain some form of underground existence through the worst years of oppression, and its leaders are at hand, the moment political freedom is reestablished, to recommence the work of rescuing the children or to advise those who enter the country from abroad with that benevolent object.

The fact that the Russian people, unled, unorganized, and coerced, are growing indifferent to politics, but that the better and educated elements amongst them are throwing themselves into any and every work, economic or humanitarian, that may stave off complete disaster, leads to the supposition that if any healthy influence from outside, in the form of economic or philanthropic aid, is introduced into Russia, it will rally round it corresponding forces within the country and strengthen them. This indeed has always been the most forceful argument in favour of entering into relations with Bolshevist Russia. The fact that warring against the Red regime has greatly fortified its power is now a universally recognized fact; and this has resulted not because the Red armies, as such, were invincible, but because the politics of the Reds’ opponents were selfish and confused, their minds seemed askew, and their failure to propose a workable alternative to Bolshevism served to intensify the nausea which overcomes the Russian intellectual in Petrograd and Moscow whenever he is drawn into the hated region of party politics. So great indeed is the aversion of the bourgeois intellectual for politics that he may have to be pushed back into it, but he must first be strengthened physically and the country aided economically.

Whether the intervention should be of an economic or philanthropic character was a year ago a secondary question. The Bolshevist regime being based almost entirely on abnormalities, it needed but the establishment of any organization on normal lines for the latter ultimately to supersede the former. Now, however, the intervention must needs be humanitarian. Soviet Russia has resembled a closed room in which some foul disease was developing, and other occupants of the house in the interests of self-protection tightly closed and barred lest infection leak out. But infection has constantly leaked out, and if it has been virulent it is only because the longer and tighter the room was barred, the fouler became the air within! This was not the way to purify the chamber, whose use everyone recognized as indispensable. We must unbolt the doors, unbar the windows, and force in the light and air we believe in. Then, the occupants being tended and the chamber thoroughly cleansed, it will once again become habitable.

Is it too late to accomplish this vast humanitarian task? Is the disaster so great that the maximum of the world’s effort will be merely a palliative? Time will show. But if the Russian dilemma has not outgrown the world’s ability to solve it, Russia must for years to come be primarily a humanitarian problem, to be approached from the humanitarian standpoint.

There are many who fear that even now the faction of the Third International will surely seek to exploit the magnanimity of other countries to its own political advantage. Of course it will! The ideals of that institution dictate that the appeal to Western philanthropy shall conceal such a dagger as was secreted behind the olive branch to Western capitalism. Has not the Third International to this day persistently proclaimed its intention to conspire against the very Governments with which the Bolsheviks have made, or are hoping to make, commercial contracts, and from which they now beg philanthropic aid? But the Third International, I believe, has a bark which is much worse than its bite. Our fear of it is largely of our own creation. Its lack of understanding of the psychology of Western workers is amazing, and its appeals are astonishingly illogical. To kill it, let it talk.

The essential impotence of the Third International is fully recognized by those little nations that were once part of Russia. Having thrown off the yoke of revolution, they have long sought to open economic intercourse with their unlovable eastern neighbour. True, their attitude is inspired in part by apprehension of those who would compel them forcibly to renew the severed tie rather than allow them to reunite voluntarily with Russia when the time shall mature; but their desire for normal intercourse is based primarily on the conviction that the communistic experiment would rapidly succumb under any normal conditions introduced from outside. Nothing will undermine Bolshevism so effectually as kindness, and the more nonpolitical, disinterested, and all-embracing that kindness, the greater will be its effect. With the supplanting of the spirit of political bigotry by that of human sympathy many rank and file Communists, attracted to the party in their ignorance by its deceptive catch-phraseology and the energy, resolution, and hypnotic influence of its leaders, will realize with the rest of Russia and with the whole world that Bolshevism is politically a despotism, economically a folly, and as a democracy a stupendous delusion, which will never guide the proletarian ship to the harbour of communistic felicity.

Misgivings are often expressed in liberally minded circles that reaction might undo all that has been achieved since that historic moment when Nicholas II signed the deed of abdication from the Russian throne. “Reaction,” in these days of loose terminology, is a word as much abused as “bourgeois,” “proletariat,” or “soviet.” If it means stepping backward, a certain amount of healthy reaction in Russia is both desirable and inevitable. Are not retrogression and progress at times identical? No man, having taken the wrong turning, can advance upon his pilgrimage until he returns to the crossroads. But the Russian nation has undergone a psychological revolution more profound than any visible changes, great though these are, and the maximum of possible reaction must still leave the country transformed beyond recognition. This would still be the case even if the sum-total of revolutionary achievements were confined to the decrees promulgated during the first month after the overthrow of the Tsar. We need not fear healthy reaction.

No power on earth can deprive the peasant of the land now acquired, in the teeth of landlord and Bolshevik alike, on a basis of private ownership. By a strange irony of fate, the Communist regime has made the Russian peasant still less communistic than he was under the Tsar. And with the assurance of personal possession, there must rapidly develop that sense of responsibility, dignity, and pride which well-tended property always engenders. For the Russian loves the soil with all his heart, with all his soul, and with all his mind. His folk-songs are full of affectionate descriptions of it. His plough and his harrow are to him more than mere wood and iron. He loves to think of them as living things, as personal friends. Barbaric instincts have been aroused by the Revolution, and this simple but exalted mentality will remain in abeyance as long as those continue to rule who despise the peasant’s primitive aspirations and whose world-revolutionary aims are incomprehensible to him. A veiled threat still lies behind ambiguous and inconsistent Bolshevist protestations. When this veiled threat is eliminated and the peasant comes fully into his own I am convinced that he will be found to have developed independent ideas and an unlooked-for capacity for judgment and reflection which will astonish the world, and which with but little practice will thoroughly fit him for all the duties of citizenship.

Shortly after the Baltic republic of Lithuania had come to terms with Soviet Russia, one of the members of the Lithuanian delegation who had just returned from Moscow told me the following incident. In discussing with the Bolsheviks, out of official hours, the internal Russian situation, the Lithuanians asked how, in view of the universal misery and lack of liberty, the Communists continued to maintain their dominance. To which a prominent Bolshevist leader laconically replied: “Our power is based on three things: first, on Jewish brains; secondly, on Lettish and Chinese bayonets; and thirdly, on the crass stupidity of the Russian people.”